A physician choosing a medical device is making a decision with consequences far beyond the brand. After more than 40 product launches across 135 countries, Cordis marketing leader Terrence Wiggins has seen how much trust depends on the information surrounding that device. Now AI is increasing content volumes just as regulation demands greater control. For MedTech companies, content now affects far more than communication. It can determine whether a product reaches a market and how safely it is used.
“When a physician is choosing a medical device mid-procedure, your brand message has consequences far beyond marketing.”
Terrence Wiggins has spent more than two decades in MedTech and worked across more than 40 product launches in 135 countries. His view of marketing is shaped by something much bigger than campaigns.
“At the end of the day, it is about the patient,” the Peripheral Marketing Leader at Cordis said recently on Phrase’s In Other Words podcast.
That point captures a growing challenge for an industry valued at $549.5 billion in 2025.
Every medical device reaches the market surrounded by information. Instructions for use, clinical documentation, training materials, packaging, regulatory information, software interfaces, and communications for healthcare professionals all influence how that device is understood and used.
As MedTech companies grow internationally, that information has to remain accurate and consistent across markets with different language and regulatory requirements, and the volume is increasing rapidly.
AI can now create and adapt content at a speed that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Regulation is simultaneously raising expectations around the control and traceability of product information. The result is a new kind of executive challenge, because MedTech companies have spent decades building rigorous systems around the device, and the information surrounding that device increasingly requires the same attention.
The risk does not stop at the device
Content problems in MedTech carry regulatory and clinical weight that goes well beyond a communications failure.
In June 2026, Boston Scientific initiated a correction after certain FARASTAR ablation generators were distributed with instructions for use that did not include information relating to the FARAPOINT catheter.
The corrective action required organizations using the product to replace the relevant instructions, ensure personnel were aware of the updated information, and communicate it to healthcare professionals.
One labeling discrepancy created an information problem that had to be corrected across multiple countries.
For a global MedTech business, those dependencies multiply quickly.
A change to approved terminology or product information may affect documentation across numerous markets. The organization has to know where that information appears, which version is current, and what needs to change.
Yet many companies are still managing regulated content through systems that were not designed for that level of coordination.
A survey reported by MedTech Intelligence found that two-thirds of medical device companies relied wholly or partly on manual processes to make large-scale changes across labels, instructions for use, and other regulated content. One manufacturer calculated that a single mass change across more than a dozen sites cost more than $350,000.
More recent research illustrates how persistent the challenge remains. In a 2024 survey of regulatory professionals at higher-risk medical device companies, 65% said translations were challenging to manage, while 29% were still proofreading regulatory and labeling content manually in-house. These are warning signs that the industry’s content operations have not kept pace with the demands being placed on them.
The regulatory pressure just intensified
Europe is making that complexity harder to ignore.
Since May 28, 2026, four modules of the EU’s centralized medical device database, EUDAMED, have been mandatory to use.
Manufacturers placing devices on the EU market must submit UDI and device information into EUDAMED, while notified bodies register information relating to certificates. The system is designed to improve the transparency and traceability of medical devices across their lifecycle.
The significance for executives goes beyond one regulation or database.
The regulatory environment is moving toward more structured and traceable information. At the same time, global businesses are producing more of that information across more systems and markets.
Those trends collide when content operations remain fragmented.
Terrence has experienced the challenge from the commercial side across companies including Stryker, Integra LifeSciences, Terumo, Cook Medical, and Cordis. He described the standard he holds himself to with characteristic directness.
“Be really intentional around the story you want to tell.”
In MedTech, that intention has to survive far more than a campaign handoff. The product story has to remain coherent as it moves through clinical, regulatory, commercial, and market-specific requirements.
For companies operating across dozens of countries, consistency cannot depend on people remembering which terminology or wording was approved last time.
It has to be built into the way information moves.
AI is accelerating the volume without solving the governance problem
AI makes the issue more urgent because MedTech companies can now use it to create, translate, adapt, and review far greater volumes of content. That offers significant advantages for organizations trying to support expanding product portfolios and international markets.
But greater production capacity does not automatically create greater control.
As Phrase CEO Georg Ell wrote in Forbes, “AI increases content volume faster than organizations can build intelligence from it.”
For MedTech, that bar is particularly high.
An AI system can generate fluent content without knowing that a particular term has been approved by a regulatory team. It can produce language that reads as credible without understanding the clinical significance of a distinction. It can adapt a message for another market without automatically knowing which elements can change and which must remain fixed.
The more content AI creates, the more important those controls become.
Terrence sees a related problem from the physician’s side.
AI-generated communication can quickly become generic. In an industry where healthcare professionals scrutinize evidence and claims, polished language alone does little to establish credibility.
“You’ve got to customize it to make sure it’s really speaking your language.”
The challenge is carrying the right context into every piece of content without losing control of the underlying meaning, regardless of how many markets and languages that content has to serve.
The questions MedTech execs should be asking
For years, multilingual content could be treated as a final step. A piece of content was created, approved, then passed into another process for international markets.
AI makes that model increasingly difficult to sustain.
Content is now being generated and adapted continuously across marketing platforms, product environments, support systems, and AI applications. The language intelligence those systems depend on cannot sit at the end of the chain.
Approved terminology and previous decisions need to be available when content is created. Market-specific requirements need to inform the output. Quality controls need to reflect the level of risk involved.
And human experts need to remain involved where judgment matters.
The question facing MedTech executives is fundamentally about governance. Can the company ensure that its people and AI systems are working from the same trusted language and market context? Can it identify where critical terminology is being used when that terminology changes? Can it scale into another market without rebuilding the same knowledge from scratch?
Those are infrastructure questions, and they belong much closer to the executive agenda.
Content has become part of the clinical infrastructure
The global MedTech industry is approaching another period of substantial growth. Future Market Insights expects the market to reach almost $892 billion by 2036.
AI will allow companies to communicate at a scale that previously required significantly more time and resources. In a recent survey of governance leaders, more than 70% said they would allow an unaudited AI model to continue operating if it had become critical to revenue. The article highlights a clear observation.
“The burden moves from proving that the system was ready for deployment to proving why it should be suspended.”
For MedTech, where content carries clinical weight, that kind of compromise has consequences that extend well beyond the balance sheet.
The organizations that lead will be the ones capable of maintaining trust and control as that production increases, building content infrastructure with the same rigor they bring to the devices themselves.
Terrence brings the argument back to its most important point.
“At the end of the day, it is about the patient.”
MedTech companies already apply extraordinary rigor to what enters the operating room. As content becomes faster to produce and harder to govern, the information that enters with it deserves the same discipline.
Watch the full conversation
Terrence Wiggins is Peripheral Marketing Leader at Cordis Corporation.
He joins Jason Hemingway on the latest episode of the In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, to discuss building trust across global MedTech markets and how AI is changing communication in a highly regulated industry.
